Have you ever had someone look you in the eye and lie to you, then stand there looking smug, like you should count yourself honored to be considered important enough to lie to?
I have, outside a committee room at the Montana capitol. I had just finished testifying against a bill intended to make it nigh impossible for the MTLP to get candidates on the ballot. A place we had earned by the hard work of our candidates and volunteers since the 1980s.
That smug face belonged to Greg Hertz, a state senator from Polson. A loyal Republican foot soldier who had won his senate seat unopposed for the second time. This bill (along with 59 others he was primary sponsor for) was going to be a verse in his swan song; he had hit the term limits set by voter initiative in 1992 and wouldn’t be back in the legislature.
Why had he chosen this subject as part of his legacy? Most of his bills were narrow technical tweaks to existing law, having to do with taxes or accounting procedures (an example: SB 16, which would “Revise the distribution period for a Montana farm/ranch risk management account”). Well, he had some help with this homework.
Montana’s junior US Senator Steve Daines was chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which was tasked with taking the Senate for his party. They needed to hold their existing seats, flip one to tie and two to take control, which looked within reach. Montana’s other Senator, Jon Tester (a Democrat) was running for his fourth term after three wins by thin margins in a state that had voted solidly Republican in 11 of the last 12 presidential elections.
Daines wanted to flip that seat in the worst way, apparently by any means necessary. He had a hand-picked candidate (Tim Sheehy, an ex-military businessman and political novice) groomed to run. He was actively running interference against Congressman Matt Rosendale, who had lost to Tester in the previous Senate election but wanted another shot.
Daines and the Montana GOP leadership are convinced that the MTLP had drawn enough votes away from their candidates to cost them victory in two out of Tester’s last three elections. Beating an incumbent in a Montana election is always an uphill battle and they needed every advantage they could get,
To clear the path his office drafted two bills for the Montana lege. One was a transparent attempt at keeping third parties out of the Senate race. It proposed a limited-time change to election law applying only to the 2024 Senate race: a non-partisan “jungle” primary and a top-two general election, with the change sunsetting after the election.
The other bill was a permanent change to the election code raising the barriers to getting and staying on the ballot to levels impractical for any but an incumbent party to reach.
We know all this about the origins of the bill because a Democratic member of the House State Administration Committee (Ed Stafman) got word of it and requested the relevant emails, which are public records. Daines’ staff had made the mistake of CCing a state employee on the chain of messages during the drafting. Stafman read from those emails at the committee hearing we testified at, entered them into the committee minutes, and sent them to the press.
Hertz was somewhat indignant at the accusation that he wasn’t the author of the bills his name was on, but he wasn’t ashamed of their contents.
His claimed intent was to limit the ability of major parties to “weaponize” candidates from minor parties, as he admitted both incumbent parties had done. His approach was to raise the barriers to the ballot to the point there would be no third parties on it at all.
In 2018 (the year after Jon Tester was chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) the Democrats had done their part to clear the field of candidates inconvenient to them by suing the Green party off the ballot, and now it was the Republicans’ turn.
The pair of bills were introduced in the Senate March 31st and referred to the Senate State Administration Committee. This is when the MTLP first got word of them. We already had our hands full backing the Defend the Guard bill, to limit deployment of the MT National Guard to combat overseas only in wars declared by Congress. There were a number of bad pieces of legislation (including a ban on ranked choice voting and an increase in the number of signatures required to get an initiative on the ballot) that we were suddenly unable to contest; we were in a fight for our party’s life.
In the Senate committee hearings the jungle primary bill (SB 566) was too obviously corrupt for even some of the Republican members, and it was tabled. The ballot access bill (SB 565) had no supporters testify and two opponents: the League of Women Voters and MTLP Chair Sid Daoud. It nonetheless sailed through on a party line vote.
At this point we had to mobilize. The Republicans held a supermajority in both houses and the governorship. We couldn’t trust to luck or conscience on this one as the pressure from Republican leadership was intense. The MTLP Executive Committee met to authorize an unprecedented step: hiring some help. A lobbyist.
Like lawyers, everybody hates lobbyists...until they need one. And we needed one.
The MTLP leadership is all volunteers. We can’t just put our lives on hold to camp out in Helena for weeks at a time, but somebody had to. We needed to get in the faces of legislators, remind them of their duties and the impacts of these bills on the voters they represented, and find some allies. Sid ended up spending about two weeks in Helena all together, a hardship for him but no big deal to the people causing the problem. The power imbalance in this situation becomes very obvious: they can mess with us at the stroke of a pen then go have a nice lunch. We have to take a day off work, find someone to feed the dog, and drive hundreds of miles in bad weather to meet with someone who may not even show up.
So we hired Apollo Pazell. And he was amazing.
Sid, John Lamb, and myself drove up on a cold morning in April to meet him in Helena and testify before the House State Administration Committee, the next hurdle the bills had to clear.
Yes, bills, plural. Normally when a committee tables a bill it’s dead. They are too busy to revisit something they’ve rejected, but the Republican leadership twisted some arms and got all but one Republican committee member to reconsider the jungle primary bill and change their votes. It had advanced to the House and been referred to committee, where we were headed.
We met Apollo for breakfast and had come prepared with a list of potentially persuadable Representatives. He had already talked to them. He had already changed a couple of minds and knew exactly who we needed to talk to and what they might need to hear. He had flown in the day before and by dinner time had already become familiar with the key players and who thought what. Any doubts we may have had about the efficacy of spending the party’s money on a lobbyist--at least on this lobbyist--vanished.
We were already busy raising funds to cover it and donors responded. We wouldn’t go into this fight empty-handed, but it was a stretch. Even so in similar circumstances I would vote to do the same again, and I have never been more grateful to write a check.
We all signed in to testify. Sid and John spoke to the impact the bills would have on us and our voters. I appealed to consciences. Apollo gave them hard facts about the legality of what they were attempting and explained how different the results would be from the stated objectives.
I can’t know whether our testimony helped or not, but five days later the House committee tabled the jungle primary bill by a vote of 16 to one. It stayed tabled despite numerous attempts at skullduggery, including at one point amending another innocuous bill to gut it and replace every word with the contents of the tabled bill. Daines even swapped favors with Senator Rand Paul to get him to personally call to lobby the committee members. I don’t think Apollo or his phone got a break the entire time.
After testimony on the ballot access bill the committee room was cleared so the parties could plot strategy. It was clear from the questioning that the bill wasn’t going to get past the committee. When they reconvened they voted unanimously to table the bill while the sponsor worked on amending it.
We fanned out to see if we could find some legislators to talk to. We got a pretty good reception. I struck up conversations with some of the Democratic committee members; they were happy to help with the two bills we were fighting but I’m under no illusions about why. They were doing the right thing, but largely for partisan advantage.
We were pretty happy with the day’s work but Apollo warned us it was too early to pop any champagne corks and he was right. Ten days later the amended ballot access bill came back up in committee and squeaked by with a vote of 10-8. On to the house floor.
When the lege votes they do it electronically from their desks and the results come up on a big screen in the chamber. The caucuses hand out lists of bills with recommendations on yea or nay, and they flip their switches while speakers on the floor support or oppose the bills that come up. The votes are usually party line.
When SB 565 came up for vote there were speeches by proponents giving the same hollow justification they had been using before; this step was just a formality. The opposition though was surprisingly passionate. Given the partisan makeup of the House I didn’t hold out much hope, and as the votes started tallying there were more green (pass) votes than red. At first.
But they didn’t stay that way. Members were switching their votes. That never happens.
In the end the bill failed by 39 to 60. 28 Republicans had ended up opposing it. Since the Senate had already voted to end their session that was it—both bills were dead.
We had won, but it took everything we had. It had distracted us from every other legislative priority, drained all our energy and finances, and what we got for it was what we started with—what we’ve had for 40 years: ballot access.
They’ll be back for us next term. We need to be ready, and we need to make the fight worth it. We need candidates to stand up to this bullying and corruption, this addiction to power for its own sake. Maybe that candidate is you.
In the US Senate race it’s Sid. If he had any doubts about running before this fight erased them.
If your first reaction to reading this is anger at a blatant, shameless abuse of power then you have an opportunity to support candidates who oppose that kind of abuse to their very core. Candidates who stick to principle even when it’s inconvenient.
The first reaction of those who orchestrated this stunt is likely frustration that their abuse of power backfired, that they traded their honor for no gain. That won’t stop them; it may bring them back harder next time. In that coming contest we may be disadvantaged by being principled but we are determined. Don’t feel sorry for them if their next defeat is humiliating; after all, they started it. And by doing so they revealed exactly who they are.
- Marty Albini | Treasurer of the MTLP